Consensus

First Thoughts

I wish I'd gotten this written over the weekend, but we had an April storm and 6 inches of snow, and then the whole weekend got kind of compacted. Anyway that came with some fun stuff (building "Snowtoros" with my daughter mostly [she is correctly obsessed with My Neighbor Totoro]) and some less-fun stuff (delaying my long run until yesterday, shoveling an asston of snow.)

I've also started building out a little RSS->BlueSky bot, but didn't get the chance to finish yet. Hopefully I will finish that either during the week or next weekend, but we'll see.

Anyway, "Consensus" is a tough nut to crack, and I'm glad for having had the extra time to mull it over.

I might give it another post after this, if I have the steam, it's a really good bit of writing and Greaves has this amazing facility with metaphor.

What I mean when I talk About the Ethics of Dorley

I've had a low hum of "ethics and Dorley Hall" going on in these posts, and I feel like I ought to be precise about that for a moment. I said, and I quote, "Dorley is an ethical black hole, more or less." And I ought to explain myself.

First off, I don't mean The Sisters of Dorley, I mean the in-fiction institution of Dorley Hall. The Sisters of Dorley is fiction, and good fiction at that, and I think it is therefore an ethical good. I'm talking about the in-universe place and underpinning organization.

Second, the gendered aspect of all of this is just fundamentally moot to me when we're looking at the institution. Dorley disappears people, which is one of the worst crimes highlighted by, for example:

• Museo do Aljube in Lisbon
• Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing.
• What I hope is the Smithsonian Truth and Reconciliation Museum About Not Doing Bad 2025 Things Anymore

Stef is an edge-case because she isn't ultimately disappeared; her family know she is alive, and she knows that they know that. But, any defense of Dorley Hall would have an extraordinary claim: that this extrajudicial disappearance is ethically defensible in a novel way. And therefore would need an extraordinary piece of evidence, which might exist -- TBD!

Third, and related, Dorley is an easily corruptible extrajudicially violent institution. If one of Dorley's inmates can suborn the institution and falsify evidence to have someone disappeared, then the institution is reckless and almost by-definition extractive.

I don't think Amartya Sen's theories of social development have a lot to do with this story, per se, but if I can shoe-horn him in later on, you can bet your ass that I will.

Anyway, onto the token recap for a chapter that's far more about internality than external motion.

Recap

Stef is writing her letters, and, because Greaves likes irony, she's telling the truth inadvertently when she says she's going on a trip, that she's bee miserable, etc.

Pippa is doing her best to be a sponsor, and I'm increasingly curious if we'll ever get a "Pippa Chapter"? I haven't thought much about her as a subject, just as a plot device, but it's probably going to really fuck her up that:

• Her first sponsorship involved afflicting a bunch of her own trauma on an innocent.
• Christine set her up to do so, knowingly.

Christine is, I think they described it as "backsliding" earlier?

It turns out Aunt Bea isn't some Stepford Ratched but has a more sophisticated notion of gender. That surprised me, and pleasantly. Bea rejecting Dorley graduates who end up being nonbinary or even just tomboyish would have felt like an easy conflict to inject into the story, and I'm glad that Greaves is doing something else.

Christine is also, maybe going through a pre-catastrophic depressive spell? I don't know the technical terminology, but I can recognize her pattern of behavior from my life, my friends, and Ron Chernow's biography of President Grant. She's spinning her wheels quite quickly but not necessarily effectively, it seems like, and in so doing is neglecting herself. She might be gearing up to some kind of binge, or else recovering from it; binge-criming maybe?

Or she might just be about to have a little menty-B.

I'm really glad, incidentally, that so much of this story is interested in Christine as opposed to Stef. I find her to be a really challenging character because she's still so rambunctious? Unreasonable? Or maybe it's just that she's very clearly lived-in but not like anyone I've ever been close with.

At the end of the chapter, Christine has a friendly encounter with Naila and Ren, a woman and nonbinary person. I think there's some subtext I'm missing there, because Greaves is usually quite spare in her writing, but I'll do my best.

Naila and Ren are, in contrast to Aunt Bea's mandate I suppose, a sign that the strict control of gender from the outside world might be relaxing. So when Christine meets them, they're a reinforcing example that she could just wear shorts and vests through life.

Also, seriously, someone explain the vests thing. Is this like the time I was in Scotland in 2014 and literally everybody, regardless of gender, had black jeans with slit razor-slit knees?

Or are shorts + vests just kind of androgynous?

Anyway, Naila. Ren.

Making their own skirt.

I mean, that part is pretty clear: the skirt is theirs, they made it. It's the most theirs that anything could be.

So maybe Greaves is foreshadowing something for Christine with all of this. It would not be a shocker if Christine turned out not to be a woman. She's so specifically uncomfortable with some of these gender markers and even with self-regarding as "trans".

But she's also still in the midst of the programme, so it's not clearly any one thing.

Stray Thoughts

Second Guessing

I saw a skeet about second-guessing your behavior as a man this weekend to avoid being called a slur, and then I read this chapter. I'm going to bring this back to Christine and Stef's relationship I promise, but I think it colored my understanding of Dorley. Someone else told me that Dorley is a satire of the NHS, and I think, either intentionally or not, it's a metaphor for the social interrelation of gender?

hey cis boys! didn't it suck how you had to second guess everything you were doing so other boys wouldn't call you a fag? how come you still do that, long after they're gone? are you a guy because you want to be, or because you see one in the mirror?

cisgenderism traps everyone

even you

(Edited for layout)

Come and See the Violence Inherent to the System

As a prepubescent, I was really really bad at not getting the shit kicked out of me. Just like, constantly getting tooled up until I myself became physically intimidating. Because, I just wasn't set up to not be a total nerd-ass-dork.

I think a lot of boys are pretty good at learning from a violent encounter. I either lacked the awareness on how to do that, or the skill to carry it off, or the compliance to be willing to do so. I once got, like, stuffed in a garbage bag and kicked by a rabble of 8th graders for being "faggy."

And not to take rabid eighth-graders too seriously in their analysis, but I don't think it had really anything to do with a failure of gender assimilation. Or with a perceived homosexuality. This was in the Bush years, so being gay was a failure of manhood. I was a chubby nerd who read a lot of books and painted Games Workshop miniatures and RPGs. And like, in 2025, D&D is a little less "no girls allowed", but you gotta trust me that that was not true when (or at least where) I was a kid.

As far as I know, that kind of experience, of either inflicting, avoiding, or suffering from violence by your in-group, is common. I have some friends who seem to have never experieinced it, or who are still uncomfortable talking about it anyway. But by and large, it happened to basically every guy in my age cohort. And honestly I think a lot of us just kept trucking because we liked Digimon too much to, what, pretend that we didn't like Digimon? So there was never an actual option to "second guess," we just endured until we grew big enough to not have to put up with it.

And, if Christine isn't quite trans, but is another kind of woman, it's because of a structurally very similar phenomenon being carried out by Dorley Hall. The second-guessing that Stefan experieinced right up until Dorley became an option has a lot more to do with the skeet's second-guessing.

And I think that's because Dorley sort of is its own gender within the context of the book.

For Stefan, the longer he lived as a man, the more miserable he was and the harder it was for him to imagine it. He really couldn't change without a COINTEL-style black-site and an external social structure. There's a huge irony for Stef that she only gets to be because of the misapplied threat of extreme violence, is all I'm saying.

And in becoming, she goes through a parallel gauntlet of same-gendered violence.

Pull Shapes

Christine is kind of stuck right now. Maybe that's just The Programme in-progress, and she's going through a different kind of struggle against it. But it's sort of striking that she's completely compromised the structure that built her new gender around her. And needed to perpetuate on Stef without a real justification. She got lucky, as did Stef, that Stef wanted what Dorley had on offer.

But Christine's kidnapping of Stef is, on a weird level, both:

• Structurally similar to the violence that so many boys go through in the first place.
• Structurally similar to the escape from gender norms that so many people try to find or build.

Maybe her kidnapping Stef is just more of the hierarchical violence eveyr group seems to do to themselves.

In Stef's half of the chapter, I think it's Indira who brings up why Aunt Bea cares about traditional femininity. Something like, "to have all of the tools for being feminine."

There's this great comic called Phonogram. The first volume is fun, and the one that I'm going to draw on the most, but The Singles Club whips absolute ass, so I have to recommend it in particular. Great playlist.

Anyway, in the first volume, Rue Britannia, there's a music-wizard named David who ends up in a club with his nails painted to read "HERO/SLUT."

And, I gotta be honest, I think David is just wearing nail polish. There's not a bigger gender change waiting in the wings, my mans just wants to paint his nails because he loves Brit pop. There's been this semi-self-imposed shrinking-of-the-category around this stuff, lately. Some of the reaction against expanding rights to self-determination has boiled down to trying to re-establish binary gender roles that weren't there in the first place.

I think, Christine has a lot in common with the eighth-graders who used to beat the shit out of me. She's harmful because she's still a child in some sense, or at least not an adult. She's not fully-formed; she's still figuring her place in the world out. She's in this hierarchical power structure being imposed from outside her, and has no choice to be there. She can reject her enclosure (by hacking the system, skating through, &c.) or she can expand it (by repeating it to other people.)

And at some point in the future, maybe she can make her own skirt. I really have no idea if that's the direction Alyson is going here, it just struck me that she's not one to throw pointless details around so something's going on with all of this.